Episode 14: Polio 1954

This episode covers the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which was awarded to John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute chose to give Enders, Weller, and Robbins the award “for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue”. Topics include the work that culminated in the creation of the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines, the nearly completed mission to eradicate polio from the face of the earth, and the reason Franklin D. Roosevelt’s portrait is on the American dime.